One characteristic element of a sonnet is the turn, or to use the Italian word, volta. The typical definition holds that:
In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.1
In their contemporary American sonnets, poets Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) and Terrance Hayes (1971–) break this schoolbook volta mold in exciting ways that feel intriguing and fresh. But is volta-variation an innovation, or an example of everything old being new again?
Looking back to the origin of sonnets—before Petrarch’s 14th-century development of the eponymous Italian form, before Wyatt and Surrey’s English adaptations2—we find that the volta in sonnets penned by Giacomo da Lentini (approx. 1210–1260) and his 13th-century Sicilian School did not necessarily occur between lines 8 and 9. Like the meandering turns of American sonnet writers Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes, early voltas had a predilection for wandering like troubadours from one side of the octet/sestet divide to the other.
The American sonnet was so named by Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, who expressed life as a Black woman in America through 14-line diamond-bladed gems thrumming with old-school sonnet elements. Coleman’s American Sonnets3 rhyme or don’t rhyme or internally rhyme;4 they consonate and assonate and rattle between smooth or ragged rhythms with march-step or mis-stepped meter. Her imagistic collages pull the reader down an emotional path which inevitably ends somewhere far different from where it began. Which is to say, Coleman’s inventive American sonnets maintain that core element of turn to get from one place to another.
Exactly where and how they turn, however, can be complex. It could be more accurate to say that Coleman’s signature American sonnets meander: Rather than taking an obvious “gotcha” turn, they bend and bend again, like the flow of a river. Taking a look at American Sonnet: 91:
the gates of mercy slammed on the right foot.
they would not permit return and bent
a wing. there was no choice but
to learn to boogaloo. those horrid days
were not without their pleasure, learning
to swear and wearing mock leather so tight
eyes bulged, a stolen puff or two
behind crack-broken backs and tickled palms
in hallways dark, flirtations during choir practice
as the body
